There are many applications, including different technical fields, which require the transport of cylindrical elements, full or empty, and their arrangement in a row, in order to perform a following processing step, e.g. filling the empty bottles and their subsequent closing.
Known apparatuses include a first conveying belt, which pulls a plurality of bottles, placed on the corresponding upper run, from the inlet station toward the outlet station, near which canalization means canalize the bottles and arrange them in a row.
With reference to FIG. 1, one of the known embodiments of the canalization means includes a first stationary abutment F1 and a second stationary abutment F2, having corresponding opposite areas, and a second conveying belt M, which has a run J, operated in a direction Z, acting as abutment and guide for the bottles, as it defines a plane perpendicular to the one, in which the upper run S of the first conveying belt is situated.
The first and second stationary abutments F1, F2 and the second conveying belt M are fastened to the structure of the first conveyor H and stand above corresponding portions of the upper run S of the latter.
The operating of the upper run S of the first conveyor H, with the run being delimited at the sides by corresponding longitudinal edges Pa, Pb, causes pulling of the bottles put thereon in the feeding direction A.
The pulled bottles gather near the canalization means and they are guided there, due to the cooperation between the first and the second stationary abutments F1, F2 and of the second conveying belt M, in an outlet channel U, situated beside the upper run S.
However, the above described solution has disadvantages, since gathering of the bottles near the outlet section of the first conveyor H can create the so-called “bridges”, that is stable blocks formed by a variable number of bottles; precisely, the mutual interaction among the latter and the interaction with the external forces, applied thereto, determine exactly a kind of bridge, interposed between the first and second stationary abutments F1, F2, so that a space without bottles is formed downstream of the jam while more bottles are further gathered upstream of the jam.
For example, this disadvantage, which depends on many factors, such as the material, from which the bottles are made, the bottles temperature, if they are of glass, and the geometrical dimensions, requires the interruption of the production and the manual intervention of an operator, with consequent waste of time and manpower for the constant control of the device.
A possible solution can be the use of agitating means, e.g. integrated in the stationary abutment element, which vibrate and oscillate with respect to a fixed position, which make unstable the bridges, created each time and thus disaggregate them.
On the other hand, the disaggregating causes sometimes, the fall of at least one bottle, forming the bridge, into the empty space defined downstream.
This stops the production and requires an operator's manual intervention, which makes this solution inefficient, at least partially.